Luke Herrine discusses student debt cancellation and the politics of legal interpretation, Lisa Heinzerling reflects on the persistence of the economic style in regulatory policy, and Erik Peinert argues that the economic style has provided cover for fundamentally reactionary arguments. Plus, a forthcoming event with Sara Nelson & Amy Kapczynski!
Continue Reading
The economic style of thinking has undeniably constrained progressive ambitions. Yet this framing overlooks a secondary role that the economic style plays in political life: it provides cover for explicitly conservative and reactionary arguments by cloaking them in seemingly apolitical, technical expertise.
For fifty years, presidents of both parties have offered a vision of regulatory policy that takes the economic style of reasoning as its North Star. Republican and Democratic presidents have differed, however, in their willingness to sacrifice economic purity when it disrupts their larger policy agendas. While Republican administrations have tended to. . .
Even as the Supreme Court seeks to squelch legal creativity in support of progressive causes, their power to do so only extends so far. We cannot let them define the terms of the debate.
Frank Pasquale considers what could replace the “economic style,” Landon Storrs tells the darker history behind the rise of the “economic style,” and Alvin Velazquez explains why the NLRB needs to adopt a more protective joint employer standard. Plus, an LPE event on torts you won’t want to miss!
The prevailing joint employer standard requires a showing of greater control than state-based corporate law requires when applying traditional concepts of agency law to parent-subsidiary and franchisor-franchisee relationships. As a result, the current standard leaves millions of workers without meaningful collective bargaining rights because companies that. . .
The rise of the “economic style of reasoning” in the 1960s cannot be properly understood without attending to the political fallout of earlier decades. Institutional economists and social Keynesians did not just fall out of academic fashion or become irrelevant to the problems at hand. Instead, many were forced out of government or toward the political center. . .
The simple supply and demand curves that today’s policymakers learned in Ec 10 in the 1990s are guiding the highest levels of policymaking in various agencies and Congressional offices today. Given this troubling reality, should we seek to reform the economic style, so that it more accurately reflects the true benefits of government action, or should we. . .
The week in review: Beth Popp Berman kicked off a symposium on Thinking like an Economist, Marshall Steinbaum argued that Berman’s account overlooks the alternative economic theories that were displaced by the economic style, and Kate Redburn analyzed the political-economic vision undergirding Supreme Court’s recent theocratic turn.. . .
As recent Supreme Court cases make clear, the libertarian and Christian wings of the conservative legal movement have orchestrated a two-step process to shift the allocation of public resources to private religious power. First, privatize public goods and services. Second, eliminate the distinction between religious and secular in the newly empowered private. . .
In charting economists’ pernicious influence on public policy, Beth Popp Berman contrasts an “economic style,” which focuses on efficiency, choice, and competition, with an alternative approach that favors equality, stability, and democratic participation. But that framing is not faithful to the actual debates that took place, out of which. . .
Why have Democrats remained committed to an incrementalist, modestly ambitious vision of governance, even as the country has faced unprecedented challenges? One critical yet underappreciated piece of the explanation is the rise of a distinctive “economic style of reasoning” that has become prevalent in Washington.
To kick off another school year, two 3L LPE fans (and Blog editors) reflect on what LPE has to offer to new law students.
Get paid to think about LPE? This could be your future.
The blog goes on August hiatus, a new primer on climate change, our top ten posts of the past year, and two new editors join the team.
A clarion call for public ownership, the varieties of antimonopolism in the progressive movement, and human trafficking through the lens of status coercion.